Review: ‘Man from Nebraska’ @ Albany Civic Theater, 8/29/14

The audience is in the dark for far too much of “Man from Nebraska,” the production that launches Albany Civic Theater’s 60th season.

This is meant literally, not as a complaint about anything being unclear in playwright Tracy Letts’ 2003 story about the titular 57-year-old Midwesterner, who loses his religious faith and takes a trip to London to sort out his crisis.

The play takes place in 17 locations over 29 scenes, some only a few minutes, or even a few seconds, long. They’re separated by scene changes that, in the second act on opening night, when I kept track of all of them, averaged more than 45 seconds apiece of near and total darkness. Cumulatively, the audience spent more than 13 minutes of the second act, and presumably a proportional amount of time in the shorter first act, sitting in the dark, waiting for furniture to be arranged and actors to take their places — waiting for something, anything, to happen.

If it was an aesthetic choice by director John Birchler, perhaps one meant to echo the down time and pauses of real life, it’s a failure and an exasperating artistic indulgence. It was more likely the result of choosing a play essentially impossible to perform as written on ACT’s tiny stage without so many lengthy scene changes that what starts as tedious becomes destructive to the audience’s experience of the play.

The original reviews for “Man from Nebraska” were mixed, certainly far less adulatory than Letts earned for his 2007 dark comedy “August: Osage County,” but there are occasional moments of good theater in ACT’s production.

As the title character, Ken Carpenter, Patrick White is his reliable self. Even White isn’t at his best, though; seemingly less at ease than he’s been in his many previous roles in regional theater, White relies on his by-now-familiar tics, mannerisms and expressions more than he does when fully into a role. Birchler gets good comedy from a scene between White and the terrific Debra Burger, as a sexually zesty businesswoman, and he and his actors finds the right tone for scenes between Carpenter and the London bohemians, played by Jennie Pines and Kevin Barhydt, who help his existential searching.

Otherwise, much of the acting is inconsistent or worse, from Morton Hess’ bizarre, and bizarrely accented, role as a randy old man to Resa Tanner’s thin, unconvincing portrayal of Carpenter’s wife. David Caso’s lighting rarely suggests a believable time of day or location, except for a nightclub. Rich Montena’s multispace set is at once too much and not enough, requiring changes between almost every scene yet rarely being fully believable for any of them. The production would have been far stronger if he’d been able to convince Birchler to use a completely abstract set, perhaps one consisting only of different levels and platforms, and trusted the audience to understand where the characters were. Such a set would have made it possible to move the play along and develop pace and emotion, not becalm it in the dark every few minutes.